History Of Inequality Research Articles

Environments, Behaviors, and Inequalities: Reflecting on the Impacts of the Influenza and Coronavirus Pandemics in the United States.

In the past century, dramatic shifts in demographics, globalization and urbanization have facilitated the rapid spread and transmission of infectious diseases across continents and countries. In a matter of weeks, the 2019 coronavirus pandemic devastated communities worldwide and reinforced the human perception of frailty and mortality. Even though the end of this pandemic story has yet to unfold, there is one parallel that is undeniable when a comparison is drawn between the 2019 coronavirus and the 1918 influenza pandemics. The public health response to disease outbreaks has remained nearly unchanged in the last 101 years. Furthermore, the role of environments and human behaviors on the effect and response to the coronavirus pandemic has brought to light many of the historic and contemporaneous inequalities and injustices that plague the United States. Through a reflection of these pandemic experiences, the American burden of disparity and disproportionality on morbidity, mortality and overall social determinants of health has been examined. Finally, a reimagination of a post-coronavirus existence has also been presented along with a discussion of possible solutions and considerations for moving forward to a new and better normal.

Promoting Meaningful and Equitable Relationships? Exploring the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) Funding Criteria from the Perspectives of African Partners

Against a backdrop of historic inequities between Northern and Southern scholars, the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) calls for “meaningful and equitable” research partnerships between UK-based academics and partners in the Global South. This paper draws on qualitative data from three workshops in the Ethiopia, Rwanda and the UK to interrogate GCRF funding criteria from the perspectives of African-based research partners. The GCRF criteria are considered with respect to African partners’ experiences of, and aspirations from, such international research partnerships in order to enrich and extend ongoing debates about power relations in development research. The study finds that GCRF criteria do address many of the familiar historic concerns of African partners, while also identifying ways in which this and similar funding schemes may unintentionally reproduce structural inequities within the South. In highlighting these less visible equity concerns, the paper draws lessons for funders, academics and others concerned with establishing genuinely equitable research partnerships.

The Social Perils and Promise of Remote Work

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed daily life, notably by forcing billions of people to work from home. As restrictions related to the pandemic are eased, companies are reconsidering their real estate footprint and contemplating a long-term move to remote work. This paper takes an in-depth look at this move. It argues that remote work is, like other consequences and aspects of the pandemic, deeply rooted in broader social issues. The move to remote work has the potential to alleviate historic inequities which arise from the demands of the modern workplace – demands which have led women to occupy lower-paying positions. It also argues that the move to remote work can contribute to the increasing precarity of work, by shifting the cost of workspace from employers to employees. It suggests governmental solutions, rooted in law and behavioural economics, which could maximise its potential and protect workers from its perils.

Specters of Cape Town: Heritage, Memory, and Restitution in Contemporary South African Art, Architecture, and Museum Practice

ABSTRACT Cape Town is home to a series of extreme disjunctive arrangements of wealth and poverty. Key to understanding the city is the deep inscription of historical injustice and its expression in contemporary forms of social injustice. In the paper that follows, we report on conversations with four indispensable commentators on the contemporary state of the city: artist Thania Petersen, architect and artist Ilze Wolff, museum practitioner Bonita Bennett, and heritage practitioner Calvyn Gilfellan. These conversations occur at a particular moment in South African life and being: in the aftermath of the Zuma presidency, in the aftermath of #RhodesMustFall, in the context of the perceived failure of the project of non-racialism, in the context of growing frustration over the intractability of historical inequality and the slow pace of change, and amid a heated national debate around the ANC government’s draft land expropriation bill. A common set of themes and preoccupations emerge: questions around race and religion; history, representation, and restitution; memory and forgetting; social justice and the abiding presence of historical injustice. Thinking inside and outside of the disciplines of art, architecture, and museum and heritage practice, these conversations present an accumulated body of wisdom and insight that might also be read as a transcript on the contemporary state of the city.

An ecological study of publicly funded elective hip arthroplasties in Brazil and Scotland: do access inequalities reinforce the inverse care law?

ObjectivesTo compare elective hip arthroplasty rates funded by the public sector in Brazil and Scotland.DesignEcological study, 2009–13, of crude and directly standardised rates of elective primary hip arthroplasty rates (per 100,000) funded by the public sector at national and regional level for age (30 + years) and gender in Brazil and Scotland.SettingNational Health Service Scotland and Unified Health System in Brazil.ParticipantsOver 30 s who had undergone an elective hip arthroplasty funded by the public sector.Main outcome measuresPublicly funded standardised elective hip arthroplasty rates in Brazil and Scotland.ResultsBetween 2009 and 2013, there was a seven-fold difference in treatment rates between Brazil and Scotland, and an eight-fold regional difference in Brazil; Brazil (7.8–8.3/100,000, increase of 0.5 per 100,000, 95% confidence interval (CI) (0.3, 0.7) from 2009/10 to 2012/13) and Scotland (from 61.1 to 57.7/100,000, decrease of 3.4 per 100,000, 95% confidence interval (1.4, 5.8) per 100,000); a two-fold difference in number of public beds per head of population (Brazil 158.3/100,000 vs. Scotland 305.1/100,000) and general medical workforce (Brazil 198.8/100,000 vs. Scotland 327.4/100,000); numbers of orthopaedic surgeons per head of population in the two countries were similar in 2013 (Brazil 5.2/100,000 vs. Scotland 4.3/100,000).ConclusionAlthough the ‘inverse care law’ is seen in both countries, access to publicly funded hip arthroplasties in Brazil is worse than in Scotland; the distribution of specialists and higher treatment rates in Brazil is highly skewed towards wealthier areas, perpetuating historical regional inequalities.

Big Data Analytics and the Struggle for Equity in Health Care: The Promise and Perils.

Big data is both a product and a function of technology and the ever-growing analytic and computational power. The potential impact of big data in health care innovation cannot be ignored. The technology-mediated transformative potential of big data is taking place within the context of historical inequities in health and health care. Although big data analytics, properly applied, hold great potential to target inequities and reduce disparities, we believe that the realization of this potential requires us to explicitly address concerns of fairness, equity, and transparency in the development of big data tools. To mitigate potential sources of bias and inequity in algorithmic decision-making, a multipronged and interdisciplinary approach is required, combining insights from data scientists and domain experts to design algorithmic decision-making approaches that explicitly account and correct for these issues.

Building a Culture of Health at the Neighborhood Level Through Governance Councils

To explore facilitators and barriers to developing and sustaining collaboration among New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Neighborhood Health Action Centers and co-located partners, who share information and decision-making through a Governance Council structure of representative members. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2018 with 43 Governance Council members across the three Action Centers of East Harlem (13), Tremont (15), and Brownsville (15), New York City. Governance Council members identified collaboration through information- and resource-sharing, consistent meetings and continuous communication as valuable for fostering a culture of health in their communities. Immediate benefits included building relationships, increased access to resources, and increased reach and access to community members. Challenges included difficulty building community trust, insufficient advertisement of services, and navigation of government bureaucracy. The Governance Councils forged collaborative relationships among local government, community-based organizations and clinical providers to improve health and well-being in their neighborhoods. Sharing space, resources and information is feasible with a movement towards shared leadership and decision-making. This may result in community-driven and tailored solutions to historical inequities. In shared leadership models, some internal reform by Government partners may be required.

Investigating structural inequities in the culture of medicine.

Drawing on Watling et al's exploration of culture in medical education, this commentary explores how historical and structural inequities impact on professional identity formation.

Exploring how Transit Practitioners Navigate Nervousness

This study explores how practitioners navigate feelings of nervousness associated with racial and economic inequities connected to public transit systems. It utilizes Gooden's (2014) 10 principles for conquering nervousness, which have received little attention in the literature to date. This preliminary investigation thus examines the extent to which the principles are adopted – or not – by transit practitioners across four diverse metropolitan areas. A purposive sample of transit equity experts led to 12 in-depth interviews. The analysis illustrates varying degrees of principle adoption amongst the participants. Findings suggest that external legal triggers (such as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) most often move the needle on racial equity in public transit. The least adopted principles indicate that agencies are less likely to adopt a race-conscious approach, limiting acknowledgement of historical inequities and structural barriers, which allows nervousness to linger and inequities to persist on a societal level.

Is Vulnerability an Outdated Concept? After Subjects and Spaces

AbstractTheories of vulnerability have constituted the conceptual core of the anthropology of disaster for roughly 40 years. Yet, there is an undercurrent of disquiet among disaster scholars and community leaders who worry that vernacular uses of vulnerability can be insulting to individuals and communities with whom we work, and/or with whom we identify. There is a growing discomfort that categorizing the “vulnerable” acts to discursively nullify the everywhere‐visible “resilience,” toughness, and genius that exist in communities that are habitually exposed to risk and hazards. We argue that constructing vulnerability as a characteristic of subaltern peoples and marginalized places is truncated at best and can perpetuate violence—epistemic, semiotic, and material—at worst. To identify the “vulnerable” is, we contend, necessarily a process of otherizing and essentializing. We see and are concerned to further encourage an emergent form of disaster anthropology that is particularly oriented toward understanding and theorizing the institutions, systems, and individuals that structure risk, and in the process to focus attention away from “the vulnerable.” To our surprise, this has emerged in recent anthropological writings in very particular ways. We find the orientation away from vulnerable populations among our colleagues who write at the intersections of disaster institutions and local communities. Here, we recognize vulnerability conceived not merely as historical inequity that produces negative outcomes, but as nested and contested sites of struggle for different visions of utopian futures, for contrasting articulations of what constitutes risk, and for diverse cultural logics of the good.

Anthropology, Museums and the Body: Lessons from an Experimental Teaching Environment

With increased interests in solving complex problems through interdisciplinary research—how best can museums engage with and benefit from such an approach? At the same time, how can we address critical questions, methods, and ethics surrounding the study of humans within museums? In order to engage with these questions, an interdisciplinary group of curators, artists and students worked together at the Smithsonian Institution to create an experimental teaching environment to rethink the disciplinary boundaries around the study of the human body. Our aim was to use a range of anthropological, art and science collections and readings to tackle issues such as race, gender, genetics, and disability, and the historic inequities resulting from colonialism. We discuss here this endeavor, including the public program we developed—the Face Cast Lab—as well as lessons learned about who affects change through this type of museum-based teaching.

Foreigners as gentrifiers and tourists in a Mexican historic district

Transnational gentrification has become a key element of urban and sociocultural transformations in several Latin American countries. New urban policies and transnational real estate markets adapt the city in order to respond to the expectations of transnational middle classes. This paper explores the case of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Methodologically, it adopts a qualitative approach and analyses two of the most important manifestations of transnational gentrification: lifestyle migration and luxury tourism. Historical files on protected buildings in San Miguel de Allende’s historic centre were used to observe functional alterations. This is supplemented with other statistical data (including the spatial pattern of Airbnb rentals) and direct observations of public spaces. I propose that transnational gentrification leads to a heritage-led transnationalisation of real estate, evidenced by luxury housing, boutique hotels, art galleries and other high culture spaces that cater to higher-income lifestyle migrants and tourists. As a result, the new class of owners and users changes the place’s identity, which has implications for lower-income groups’ right to the city. The process in San Miguel de Allende is analogous to processes in cities such as London, New York or Paris, where notions of heritage urbanism have also helped transnationalise local real estate markets. However, it also evinces other processes that are more difficult to appreciate in the Global North (growing rent gaps, real estate companies’ aggressive pursuit of gentrification and deep historical inequalities that are exacerbated by heritage-led gentrification).

Recontextualización de la política de gestión en escuelas indígenas de tiempo completo en Baja California

El presente artículo reporta un estudio sobre el modelo de gestión escolar en cinco escuelas primarias públicas indígenas adscritas al Programa Escuelas de Tiempo Completo (PETC) en el estado de Baja California, México desde la propuesta teórica de los procesos de recontextualización empleada por Stephen Ball. El propósito fue inferir los procesos de interpretación y traducción en la puesta en práctica del modelo de gestión del PETC por parte de diferentes actores educativos (supervisora, directores y docentes). Desde una perspectiva cualitativa, se realizaron observaciones en las escuelas y se recabaron entrevistas semiestructuradas. Para el análisis de éstas, utilizamos el análisis de enunciados en primera persona propuesto por James Paul Gee. La finalidad fue identificar las posturas ante los bienes sociales en el discurso de los interlocutores en cuanto al trabajo escolar cotidiano. En los resultados se destacan las restricciones del contexto bajo las cuales el PETC es puesto en práctica, así como las acciones que los agentes educativos llevan a cabo para cumplir con las demandas del programa, además de las funciones que realizan de forma cotidiana. De este modo, el programa y sus elementos genéricos se recontextualizan en un contexto marcado por una desigualdad y marginación históricas.

Exploring the challenges of information and communication technology localization in South African higher education: a language management approach

ABSTRACTOver the past decades, the language management discourse in South Africa has focused on the development and intellectualization of the functional status of indigenous African languages in high-status domains. African languages are marginalized despite the existence of various empowering and restorative legislative provisions and policies of the new democratic dispensation. Of particular interest in this paper are the challenges that affect the localization of information and communication technologies in the higher education domain. The reliance mostly on former colonial languages for the transmission of knowledge in education has had a negative impact on the development and intellectualization of these languages. It has been argued that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) localization has the potential of improving information access in indigenous languages which can further facilitate the maximum utilization and development of these languages. The promotion of African languages and their use in scientific domains is critical in addressing historical linguistic inequalities and injustices in the South African higher education sector. In this paper, I argue that the dynamics associated with the connection between macro and micro level language management, and some socio-linguistic and socio-cultural factors affect the ultimate goal of achieving language management goals associated with ICT localization.

Broadening of the Field of Corporate Boards and Legitimate Capitals: An Investigation into the Use of Gender Quotas in Corporate Boards in Norway

Drawing on 31 interviews, we explore the life trajectories of some of the women with most directorships in Norway after the introduction of the quota, with specific attention to their capitals. Adopting a Bourdieusian approach, we examine to what extent forced structural changes (the quota), challenge what are valued as legitimate capital(s) in the field (corporate boards). Our research demonstrates the progressive role of the quota in challenging gendered ideas of suitability. We found that structural adjustments in the field are leading to realignment in terms of the field-specific value and meaning of different types of capitals, which are redrawing the boundaries of the field in the process. We conclude that the external push through state-imposed regulation has broadened the field, resulting in the recognition of a wider set of capitals as legitimate. The study responds to the much-debated question about the utility of quotas in addressing systemic and historical inequalities.

Class Attitudes, Political Knowledge, and Support for Redistribution in an Era of Inequality

ObjectiveWhy, despite positive feelings toward the poor and working classes, relative to the rich and big business, has American public support for redistribution failed to appreciably increase during an era of high, and rising, income inequality?MethodsI argue that this puzzling disconnect is due, in part, to a lack of general political knowledge. Using survey data from the 2012 American National Election Study, I test how political knowledge conditions the relationship between people's economic class group attitudes and their support for redistribution.ResultsPeople with low (high) levels of political knowledge weakly (strongly) connect their class attitudes with support for redistributive spending and progressive taxation. Data from four ANES panel studies show that this does not result from the less knowledgeable holding weak “nonattitudes” toward these class groups. Rather, consistent with Converse's classic work, I attribute this to less knowledgeable individuals lacking awareness about how redistributive policies benefit different social groups.ConclusionThese findings help us to better understand an important puzzle in American politics: why a mass public that purports to favor the poor and working classes over the economic elite has not turned more strongly in favor of redistribution during an era of historic inequality.

Indigenous higher education sector: the evolution of recognised Indigenous Leaders within Australian Universities

Abstract There is clear evidence that Indigenous education has changed considerably over time. Indigenous Australians' early experiences of ‘colonialised education’ included missionary schools, segregated and mixed public schooling, total exclusion and ‘modified curriculum’ specifically for Indigenous students which focused on teaching manual labour skills (as opposed to literacy and numeracy skills). The historical inequalities left a legacy of educational disparity between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Following activist movements in the 1960s, the Commonwealth Government initiated a number of reviews and forged new policy directions with the aim of achieving parity of participation and outcomes in higher education between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Further reviews in the 1980s through to the new millennium produced recommendations specifically calling for Indigenous Australians to be given equality of access to higher education; for Indigenous Australians to be employed in higher education settings; and to be included in decisions regarding higher education. This paper aims to examine the evolution of Indigenous leaders in higher education from the period when we entered the space through to now. In doing so, it will examine the key documents to explore how the landscape has changed over time, eventually leading to a number of formal reviews, culminating in the Universities Australia 2017–2020 Indigenous Strategy (Universities Australia, 2017).

Reimagining equity: redressing power imbalances between the global North and the global South

ABSTRACTEquity in development is most often used to describe something the global North does to or in the global South, rather than as a concept that applies between the North and South. Neither does it take into consideration the issue of creating systems that foster equity between the North and the South, within the context of historical inequalities and power dynamics. This article examines equity in development from four different perspectives: language, knowledge production, funding, and partnerships, recognising that if we are to reimagine development in a genuine rather than a cosmetic way, we need to address the root causes behind global inequity and grapple with entrenched power imbalances. By explicitly using the term ‘equity’ in the context of re-imagining the global development system, we both acknowledge this reality and make explicit the fact that a rebalancing of power relations and global resources is necessary if we are to achieve a more equal global system.

Misrepresentation, Resistance and (Re) Constructing Space in the Plays of Bate Besong and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Micere Gathae Mugo

This paper examines resistance to both colonial and neo-colonial oppression, exploitation, dictatorship and marginalisation as an authorial ideology in the plays of Bate Besong, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o and Micere Gathae Mugo. In an attempt to (re) construct their misrepresented identities and create a conducive environment for the oppressed and marginalised masses, the playwrights create in their plays, characters whose principal objectives are to radically dismantle all forms of socio-cultural, economic and historical inequalities as an attempt to emancipate themselves and the masses from the excesses of colonial and neo-colonial leadership politics. Consequently, resistance is projected in the plays under study as an ancestral imperative, a social expectation and a pressing personal need towards reconstructing space for the postcolonial masses. From a Marxist and Postcolonial theoretical paradigms, this paper sustains the argument that in the plays of Besong, Ngugi and Micere, there is a radical and contestatory content and this is initiated by the kind of nauseating images and stereotypical representations given to the oppressed masses by colonial and neo-colonial leadership. The analysis in this paper reveals that resistance becomes a pivotal alternative and a condition sine qua non for the Anglophone Cameroonian and Kenyan masses to liberate their societies from the bondage imposed by colonialist in partnership with the neo-colonialist. As a result, resistance as an ideology becomes unavoidable towards deconstruction, deligitimacy and reassertion of the historical and cultural identities of the postcolonial people.

WHEN TWO PANDEMICS COLLIDE: RACISM, COVID-19 AND THE ASSOCIATION OF BLACK SOCIAL WORKERS EMERGENCY RESPONSE

In the spring of 2020, African Nova Scotians were faced with two emerging pandemics: the ongoing pandemic of anti-Black racism, and the pandemic of COVID-19. The Association of Black Social Workers created a response specific to the needs of African Nova Scotians, employing the six practice principles of Africentric social work. They established a partnership with community and government partners to manage a phone line to triage based on need, and a virtual community check-in to connect about the pressing Black Lives Matter movement. This paper contextualizes the historic and current systemic racial inequities faced by African Nova Scotians within the context of the current public health emergency, and the need for an equitable, community-based emergency response. This specialized, Africentric service provision model can be used to inform the development of emergency responses for other Black communities in Canada.